


A Promise For After Death

by ElisabethMonroe



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-21
Updated: 2013-11-21
Packaged: 2018-01-02 05:13:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1052912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElisabethMonroe/pseuds/ElisabethMonroe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sebastian Moran is not meant to be without at least one person ordering him around. It had been like that since he was a small child. Jim Moriarty knew this, so, when Sebastian finds himself without a boss, someone else enters. Someone who can be more dominate, fiercer, push harder, than Sebastian could ever imagine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Promise For After Death

Sebastian had fallen into a routine. Wake up, eat, get sick, go to work, try to get killed, come home, eat, shower, go to sleep on the couch because the bed hurt too much now. That had been his life since Jim died. He didn’t mind. He was honestly just waiting to get shot. He didn’t care what happened between now and then.  
This changed.  
He’d been coming home, opening the door, his rifle bag slung over his shoulder and looking strangely like a simple work out duffel, when he sensed something was wrong. His hand paused on the door handle and he took a deep breath, closing his eyes and dropping his duffle before swinging the door open.  
It was easy to avoid the arm coming straight to his windpipe, however, he missed the follow up shot to his stomach, and the kick to his legs, and just like that, he was on his back, gasping for air, which is so close to perfection should this have been in a different situation.  
There was a man on top of him, holding him down, fighting with Sebastian’s arms to keep him still. It didn’t matter, Sebastian used momentum to roll them over and slammed the man into the ajar door. For half a second, Sebastian thought he had the upper hand, but the man suddenly surged forward, sending Sebastian backwards. A gun was pressed against his head and Sebastian sighed. That was that. It was finally done.  
Apparently, something was still alive in Sebastian though and he grabbed a gun from under the table they were next to, pressing it to the other man’s head and cocking it. A glint of light showed on the man’s teeth as he grinned.  
“Easy there, Tiger,” he hummed and that voice was so familiar, all the letters lilted in the right place that Sebastian could almost ignore the lower tone. Before he knew what he was doing, Sebastian had pulled the other man down, gun discarded, and crashed their lips together. He heard a startled noise from the other man before a slight sound of pleasure escaped his lips too. The lips were rougher than they had been, all callouses and sun tanned or sun dried and Sebastian entertained the notion that was what Jim felt when Sebastian kissed him.  
“You’re not Jim,” were the blond’s first words to this intruder. His eyes were still shut, lips parted slightly, one hand clenched tightly in the other man’s shirt.  
“No, that I’m not,” the other said. “My name is James Moriarty still. There’s three more of us. Goes to show a bit of my father’s character.” God, that voice was just like Jim’s. Maybe Sebastian could coerce him into going an octave higher. “My brother said that if anything ever happened to him, I was to come take care of you.”  
Sebastian stared up at the brunette for the first time. A rough five o’clock shadow, much like the one the sniper was sporting now except darker, traced a strong jawline. Jim didn’t grow out facial hair. Sebastian had never seen what a Moriarty chin of stubble looked like. He was tanner and built much more like Jim and looked wider than Sebastian simply because he wasn’t quite as tall, when, in all reality, they were probably the same strength. The faint outline of dog tags could be seen against his shirt. “Still active duty?” the blond asked since there was nothing else to say.  
James grinned and raised an eyebrow, in a very unlike-Jim fashion. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Jimmy may be on the side of the bad guys but I’m still serving queen and country. Heard you were a fine soldier too, Colonel.” The grin was wickedly sharp, still not Jim though, but close enough for Sebastian to pretend.  
~~~  
The next three months were a constant flurry of fucking and sleeping and eating. Work was done from a computer and phone. They left the flat only to go running around the area, racing each other in a wonderfully painful marathon of sprints. They boxed and wrestled and worked out in the weight room Jim had installed for Sebastian. And the bedroom was even better than all the rest combined. Sebastian was thrown back into the past, back to the military where it didn’t matter who was more dominant, it only mattered who laid down first, who could wrestle the other onto their back.  
It wasn’t that Sebastian didn’t enjoy bottoming. With Jim he did, not that it happened much, but now, he just wanted to relinquish all control and James was perfectly willing to take it. They’d fuck until both were red in the face from not breathing, until Sebastian couldn’t unhook his legs from James’s waist, until they’d collapse on each other and pass out, no concern of washing themselves off present.  
It was on a tamer night, however, that Sebastian found himself on James’s chest after fucking the other man until he cried out Sebastian’s name rather than a random curse when James had shifted suddenly and brushed a finger down Sebastian’s face, right over his scar. “Jimmy said that it was a tiger, eh?” he said. Sebastian had learned that this was how the general asked questions.  
The blond nodded. “I was out on night watch and I had wondered off with a knife. I had stalked down something, figuring it was just two people fucking around and it wasn’t. It was a massive she-tiger. She managed to get me down in a ditch, I lost my footing, she attacked me, and I had to stab her.” He shrugged, moving James’s hand to his chest to map out the three deep cuts there too. “I wasn’t found for three days and by then…there really wasn’t anything they could do for the scarring.”  
James raised an eyebrow, hurumphed in that way of his and laid back down. “You’re looking better, you know,” he said suddenly, continuing to stare at the ceiling. “As compared to the skeleton that I found you. You look like a soldier, a fighter, again. That’s what Jimmy would’ve wanted.”  
At that, Sebastian mimicked the sound and laid against the other’s shoulder. “Does that mean you’re leaving?” He felt James shrug.  
“Dunno. Might stay. I’ve not got much else to do with my year off. I’d just enlist again. Honestly, I don’t mind this at all.” He shrugged again and pursed his lips, cocking one eyebrow.  
Sebastian sighed. “Were you and Jim close?” he asked, glancing up at the other and craning his neck to do so.  
“I guess. I mean, he was the youngest and I was the oldest. I looked out for him but…there wasn’t much to do. He was so fucking open about being…” A muscle worked in his jaw. “Different. He didn’t try to hide how much he liked guys or how much he thought about murder and shit. I couldn’t help him without getting drug down too.”  
“But…you were his old brother!” Sebastian objected, sitting up quickly. “He was your little brother and you let him get hit! He fucking hates his childhood because of all of that shit! If I’d been there, if I’d been allowed to know him for that long, I’d have fought tooth and claw for him!” His fingers clenched into a fist against the bed sheets.  
James slowly covered Sebastian’s hand with his own. “Colonel, there was nothing to be done. You have to remember that I had to protect myself too. I grew up in the same house that he did. The same neighborhood, the same school. We all did. We were all fucked up. One’s in a mental institute, one offed himself, one’s fucking dead ‘cause he’s a moron, and one’s a socially anxious actor who can’t do anything with his life. Then there’s me. I’m fucking my dead brother’s boyfriend.”  
“That has nothing to do with anything!” Sebastian objected, hitting James’s chest harder than necessary, harder than playful, harder than in training, harder than in bed. “I had to wake up every day knowing that he hates everything that’s ever happened to him and knowing that there’s not a damn thing I could do about it and you let it happen! You were there! He trusted you! And you did nothing! You did nothing. I did nothing. I couldn’t even save him while I was here. Who the fuck am I kidding?” he whimpered, turning his face into James’s shoulder.  
And for the first time in a very long time, Sebastian Moran cried. He cried for his lost lover, for past battles that could never be won, for moving on, for not moving on, for wanting to die, for not dying. His fist remained against the brunette’s chest as he collapsed in front of him and James simply ran a hand through the slightly shaggy, curly blond hair and rubbed a thumb over the back of the deadly fist on his chest.  
“There’s nothing anyone could have done for my brother, Colonel,” he said softly. He kissed Sebastian’s temple gently and held onto the other man. General James Moriarty didn’t like to think he was a caring man, certainly he wasn’t at his brother’s level of callousness, but he wasn’t at James Richard Moriarty’s level of empathy either. This was different. He’d been here. He’d grown up with his brothers like this. He moved on to the military and held his men like this. The only thing different was now they were sans clothes.  
“I should have saved him! I should have been able to stop! I should have told him how much he meant, how much I couldn’t do this without him!” The blond was shaking in rage and pain and confusion and embarrassment but he couldn’t stop.  
“Colonel, do you honestly think he would have believed you? We both know my brother. We both know he had his mind made up about all of this, but especially that you could move on without him. He wrote to me before he died and said as much.” He stroked his knuckles down the side of Sebastian’s face slowly, trying to calm him down. “And I know you can too, because my brother believed in you and he doesn’t put his trust lightly about.” He kissed Sebastian quickly, parting his lips and licking along the lower one.  
Sebastian shook his head and pulled away. “He can’t know that. He was the other half of me. I’m fucking his brother because I can almost pretend it’s him half the time and the other half I’m hoping he’ll kill me.”  
James snorted, rolling his eyes. “I’m not going to kill you,” he muttered, pushing Sebastian back so the blond was on his back. The brunette quickly straddled him, running his hands appreciatively down Sebastian’s chest. “Tell me where this is from,” he said, rubbing at a scar on Sebastian’s ribs.  
“Mycroft Holmes,” Sebastian said begrudgingly, not wanting to change the topic. He was much happier wallowing in self pity. “I was captured and he sliced between all my ribs. I couldn’t move for a month. Jim stayed by my side. Set up an office on my side of the room.” He smiled fondly at the memory, hand and fingers tightening around an invisible counterpart.  
“What about this tattoo?” James hummed, tracing the outlines. He was enjoying this. Sebastian was calming down and he was learning about all the things he’d been staring at for the past three months.  
“I was eighteen. That’s the quote right? ‘Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of War’. It was the day before I deployed and I got it done as a farewell gift to myself,” Sebastian explained. “I’ve got it on my smokes case to.”  
“What about the wings on your back?” James asked, idly going over the letters again.  
“My older brother,” Sebastian said slowly, watching James’s face for a reaction. “He was shot walking me home from school one day. It was a random thing. Just a drive by. I was eight, he was sixteen. We’d been holding hands, waiting to cross the street and some guys riding a fucking high shot him in the back. That’s why there’s two bullet holes. The same location he was shot. It was my first tattoo and I had just turned sixteen,” he said quietly.  
James raised an eyebrow and said nothing, but suddenly the earlier outburst seemed logical. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This one.”  
“It’s been thirty years. I’m over it.” Sebastian sat up to look at the scar under fire. He laughed suddenly. “I was hiding in a tree when my boyfriend’s dad came into his room. One of those situations where it was run or die. I fell out of the tree and cut my entire body up. This is the one that stayed. I was fifteen.”  
James laughed too, rolling his eyes. “You’re one of the most interesting men I’ve ever met, Colonel,” he mused through a smile. “I mean, you’re made up of all of these tiny stories that are just perfect. You couldn’t write this shit.”  
Sebastian rolled his eyes. “Whatever, General. Just go the fuck to sleep, yeah?” he hummed, wrapping the general’s arm around his waist like a security blanket, which is honestly what he’d become for the hardened ex-colonel.  
General James Moriarty would leave three months later and go back into deployment. Sebastian would remain in London and continue to run Jim’s empire. During James’s leaves, he’d come to Sebastian and they’d spend however long together. Eventually the sex settled down and they became dangerously close. It wouldn’t be for two and a half years that Sebastian ever worried about another Moriarty and their promises after death.


End file.
